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The Not-So-Solid South

One of the great lessons of 20th-­century history is that international conflicts can best be understood as a product of politics within nation-states or communities. Viewed from the end of the cold war, the long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was shaped as much by divisions within the Communist world — Russia and China, most prominently — as by the confrontation with the United States, and vice versa. Recent events reveal the same principle at work in the hostilities between Iran and the United States, where the internal politics of each nation — divisions between so-called hard-liners and moderates — have shaped and reshaped the way the two countries address each other.

That lesson seems to be useful as well in understanding the conflict between free and slave states that eventually exploded into the American Civil War. For Lacy K. Ford, the division between the states of the upper South (Virginia along with the border slave states) and those of the lower South (South Carolina and the cotton-producing states to its south and west) best explains how white Southerners “understood their position with regard to slavery, and how they saw themselves as citizens of the United States right down to secession and Civil War.”

Ford, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is hardly the first to emphasize this internal division, but most historians have focused on the years immediately prior to the Civil War, the secession crisis and the war itself. In “Deliver Us From Evil,” however, Ford traces that division back to the period between the founding of the Republic in 1789 and the beginning of the abolitionist assault on slavery in the 1830s. In extraordinarily close detail, he demonstrates how white slave-owning Southerners in the two regions followed sharply different trajectories in addressing the slavery question, and he argues that the development of a Southern nationality and its controversy with the North must be understood from the inside out rather than the outside in.

From the first years of the 19th century and perhaps earlier, slaveholders in the upper South searched for ways to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution by putting slavery on a slow road to extinction. Slavery, in their view, was a dangerous, morally indefensible, unrepublican and economically retrograde institution. But they never seemed to find the political will to act. As Northern critics observed, that failure called into question their reputed commitment to emancipation, which Ford calls “a wish and not a plan, a preference but not a priority.” Eventually all but a few surrendered any emancipatory pretense. Instead, they embraced a policy of “whitening” that would rid the region of both slavery and black people, free as well as slave, by prohibiting the importation of slaves, selling other slaves farther south, encouraging manumission and deporting — or “colonizing” — freed slaves to Africa or elsewhere beyond the borders of the United States.

While the upper South’s slave masters hoped this “demographic reconfiguration” would deliver them from evil, those of the lower South placed their trust in an “ideological reconfiguration” of a labor system that they hardly considered an evil. For them, the enormous profits generated by the expansion of cotton production proved that slavery was an asset rather than a liability. If the upper South equivocated about slavery’s future, the lower South rushed to welcome it. Shortly after the start of the 19th century, South Carolina reopened the African slave trade. The expansion of slavery assured the region’s economic prosperity and fulfilled the promise of the Revolution, providing what John Calhoun called “the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”

Ford painstakingly unravels the divergent perspectives on slavery, making “Deliver Us From Evil” required reading for anyone interested in the development of Southern society. Disputes over the efficacy of gradual emancipation, the nature of the slave trade, the purpose of manumission and colonization, and the appropriate defense of slavery roiled white Southerners across the region, so much so that Ford concludes that the only thing they could agree upon was opposition to abolition.

Differences over the question of colonization were a case in point. Many upper South slaveholders viewed it as a mechanism to free their region from slavery. Lower South slave owners saw it only as a means to rid themselves of free blacks and strengthen the institution of slavery. The tension grew over time, until slaveholders in the lower South considered upper South colonizationists to be crypto-­abolitionists, while upper South colonizationists saw the lower South’s intransigence as a more serious obstacle to change than the Northern opponents of slavery.

But such tensions manifested themselves most fully over how best to control slaves, a particularly pressing matter in the lower South as its slave population swelled to a majority in many places. Traditionally, Southern slaveholders, like slave masters the world over, believed that slave management rested on coercion and that only constant vigilance, terror and intimidation could keep slaves under control. But in the first years of the 19th century, Ford says, an “insurgent ideology,” which held that masters should control their slaves by incorporating them into their households, challenged the conventional wisdom. The master would become less a monarch than a stern but benevolent father, and slaves less dumb beasts than obedient children.

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In dismissing the stale notions that slaveholder paternalism developed from the ancient habit of noblesse oblige or from the peculiar conditions of Southern slavery, Ford makes his most important contribution to our understanding of the development of Southern society. He demonstrates that paternalism was made, not born, the product of an intense, if often bewildering debate among the slaveholders themselves.

While the shift toward paternalism followed different paths in the upper and lower South, it was the clergy that took the lead in both areas, raising questions about how much independence to allow black Christians and whether they should be taught to read (in order to have access to the Bible). The angry contest between traditionalists who warned against paternalist coddling and reformers protesting the barbarism and futility of the old regime drove Southern politics for the first three decades of the century. But by the time the abolitionists began their assault on slavery, the paternalist ideology was in place. Even Calhoun defended the slave plantation as a community.

The problem, however, was that paternalism was a fiction. Slaves understood that the plantation was no community and the master no father; the actions of the slaveholders revealed that they did as well. When periodic insurrections and insurrection scares made it clear that paternalism did not create “hard-working, loyal and well-behaved” slaves, masters returned to the fist, lash and noose. All of which suggests that whatever the regional differences were among slave­holders, the ownership of slaves did in fact pull them together. Slaveholders in the upper and lower South may have shared only their opposition to abolition, but that was enough.

In peering into the internal politics of Southern society, “Deliver Us From Evil” tells us a great deal about the developments that would eventually lead slaveholders, first in the lower South and then in the upper South, to break from the North. But the ownership of property-in-man upon which Southern society rested remains the place to start any such discussion.

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

The Slavery Question in the Old South

By Lacy K. Ford

673 pp. Oxford University Press. $34.95

Ira Berlin, distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland, is the author of the forthcoming “Making African America: The Four Great Migrations.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Not-So-Solid South. Today's Paper|Subscribe